I'm trying to use miRNA data from the mirBase database in some of my R pipelines. The data file I'm interested in is the mirna.dat which contains info from all published miRNAs (across multiple species).

One entry within the data file looks like this (output of readLines() function)

The data is formatted similar to EMBL data structure which doesn't play nicely with R's base read functions. I tried a gbRecord EMBL parser function from biofiles package but it threw an error message saying mandatory fields are not found. I think, although the mirBase data is similar to EMBL, it is not structured the same causing the failure here. Do you have a recommendation for ways to deal with this type of data?